Basic Recipes With Rice

This easy Mexican rice recipe is SO simple you'll want to make it every Taco Tuesday, or as a side dish for all your Mexican meals!

Taco night at home is a frequent occurrence and so Mexican rice is a side dish we often have. Back in the day I used to buy the microwavable Spanish rice packets for convenience -- and because I didn't have a good homemade recipe yet. Now I make this perfect fluffy rice all of the time. My easy Mexican rice recipe doesn't include any extra fillings, so your picky kids will also love it!

Mexican food is Ben's favorite. Of course, I love it, too, but Ben could eat tacos and rice every day without getting sick of it. Most date nights I have to challenge him to go somewhere besides a Mexican restaurant because we already dine at our favorite one as a family almost weekly. It's nice to change it up when we don't have the kids!

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He also loves when we make Mexican cuisine at home. This Mexican rice recipe is always a part of the line up!

I'm glad to have this recipe for our Tex-Mex meals at home. It's super simple and results in a nice fluffy Mexican rice.

You may choose to stir in some peas, diced tomatoes, green chiles, etc. No problem! Others have had great results with stirring in salsa instead of the tomato sauce if you'd like to try that!

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To kick it up a flair, you can also splash in a little lime juice. I don't do this but only because I always serve lime slices with our Mexican dishes, so if someone wants to squeeze in a little lime into their food they can control it!

The basic recipe includes no extra ingredients stirred in so that even your pickiest eaters can enjoy it. Follow these directions and helpful images for how to make Mexican rice from scratch.

How SIMPLE is that!?? You can definitely make this. I'm all about easy and simple these days, while keeping it healthy and homemade. Click here for full recipe ingredients and instructions.

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This easy Mexican rice recipe is SO simple you'll want to make it every Taco Tuesday, or as a side dish for all your Mexican meals!

Calories: 185 kcal | Carbohydrates: 29 g | Protein: 4 g | Fat: 6 g | Saturated Fat: 4 g | Cholesterol: 2 mg | Sodium: 679 mg | Potassium: 230 mg | Fiber: 1 g | Sugar: 3 g | Vitamin A: 263 IU | Vitamin C: 3 mg | Calcium: 15 mg | Iron: 1 mg

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About Seeded At The Table Thanks for visiting! We’re the Gladd family! We love donuts, Disney, LEGO and Jesus. Not in that order, of course. 🙂 Ben shares DIY wood-working projects and Nikki shares delicious recipes. You’ll also find a sprinkling of travel adventures and other family fun ideas!Use fresh or leftover white rice for this easy, vegetable-studded fried rice. We fry the grains in batches and season lightly for perfect texture and flavor.

Kenji is the former culinary director for Serious Eats and a current culinary consultant for the site. He is also a New York Times food columnist and the author of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science.

I've been holding off on doing a full fried rice story for several years now. I'm not really sure why. Fried rice is a great way to use up leftovers; it is infinitely variable, and there are

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Fried rice comes in many styles. In China, it's typically lightly seasoned with salt and perhaps a little soy sauce or another sauce, along with scant amounts of aromatics and meat. In the Chinese-American tradition, you'll find it made with bigger chunks of meat, and much more sauce. It's the former style that I mostly grew up eating, and that's the style that I'm interested in for now.

Perfect fried rice is all about texture. I was looking for rice that had distinct grains, each with a slightly chewy fried exterior and a tender bite. I wanted grains that were separate enough from each other that you could taste and appreciate their texture, but still sticky enough that you could pick up small clumps with a pair of chopsticks or a spoon.

Fried rice recipes typically call for Chinese-style medium-grain rice, though Thai-style versions use fragrant jasmine, and Japanese-style fried rice can even be made with short-grain sushi rice. I tried making fried rice with all of those, as well as with long-grain rice (standard Carolina and basmati rice) and parboiled rice (like Uncle Ben's). I did not do any testing on brown, wild, or black rice varieties.

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I was expecting disasters from at least a couple of batches, but surprisingly, they all produced decent results. Longer-grain rice varieties tended to be the most troublesome, as they fell apart a little bit during stir-frying and lacked the plumpness that gives fried rice its signature chewy-tender texture.

I'd always heard that fried rice is best made with day-old rice, and that fresh rice will turn to mush if you try to fry it. But is this really true? And if so, what is it about the resting period that makes older rice superior to fresh rice?

As rice sits after cooking, a couple things happen. First, there's evaporation: The rice gets drier. Second, we've got starch retrogradation: Gelatinized starches that have swollen up and softened during cooking will recrystallize as they cool, turning the rice firm and less sticky. The same things happen with bread; in the past, I've found that most recipes that call for stale bread are actually really more interested in dry bread (see my stuffing recipe, for instance).

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I wasn't sure what I was looking for with rice, stale or dry. So I tried it. Over and over and over again. To test dryness, I used batches of rice that I set under a table fan at room temperature, which I hoped would rapidly dry out the rice without giving it much of a chance to turn stale. To test staleness, I stored batches of rice for lengths of time varying from half an hour to 12 hours, very tightly covered on plates in the fridge, allowing their starches to recrystallize without drying out. I also stored rice the way most of us do: in not-well-sealed Chinese takeout containers. Presumably these batches would get both dry

My results showed some very interesting twists. First off, all of the batches of rice that were under a fan (dried and not staled) worked out well. None of the very tightly wrapped batches worked, which indicates that dryness is an essential factor for fried rice. The batches that were stored loosely wrapped for times ranging between one hour and around six hours actually became

Than rice that had been stored loosely covered in the refrigerator for one to six hours. What gives? Most of my other tests indicated that dryness matters, but surely fresh rice is the moistest of the lot?

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The important part. It's the surface moisture that is going to cause your rice to rapidly suppress the temperature of the wok. It's the surface moisture that's going to cause your rice to stick together.

That explains why fresh rice and rice that's been placed underneath a fan work well. With rice placed in the refrigerator, on the other hand, you slow down the evaporation process. Meanwhile, internal moisture from the grains will start to move outward, adding moisture to the surface of each grain and making the rice more difficult to fry. Eventually that surface moisture will evaporate again, and the rice will become easier to fry.

This was an obvious one: Excess starchiness is what causes rice to clump. Nobody likes clumpy fried rice. If you are cooking your rice from raw in order to make fried rice, make sure to rinse off excess starch first. A quick dunk and shake in a bowl of cold water, or a 30-second rinse under a cold tap while agitating the rice, is plenty.

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I did consider whether or not oiling the rice while it was still cold before it hit the wok was a good idea. It's not: Cold oil doesn't spread as well as hot oil, so you end up using way more than you'd typically need. Best to break up the rice by hand and leave the oil for the wok.

Once the rice is broken up, you're ready to cook. Fried rice is more forgiving than most stir-fries (unlike meat or green vegetables, it's not easy to overcook rice), but it's still a fast process. Make sure you have your other ingredients ready to go before putting the wok on the flame.

While it's true that woks were not designed to be used on Western-style gas ranges, with their rings of burners, they are still far superior vessels for stir-frying than a skillet

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